![]() In just over a decade the web has gone mobile with the explosive growth of sensor-laden smartphones, and location is big business - $3.8 billion’s worth of big in 2018 if you believe Berg Insight. ![]() The maps and data you’ve created are a key element of what’s today loosely termed the geoweb, enabling startups to create maps at little or no cost, allowing some amazing cartography to be created, stimulating research projects, and allowing businesses to spring up to monetise all of this data - some successfully such as MapBox, some less successfully, such as CloudMade.Īfter reading all of this amazement and adoration, you’re probably expecting the next sentence to start with “ But …”, and I’m afraid you’d be right.īut times change, and the mapping and location world we live in has changed rapidly and in unexpected ways since OSM started in 2004. Just looking at the latest set of database statistics (over 4.6 billion GPS points, over 2.8 billion nodes, over 282.5 million ways, and 3.2 million relationships as of today’s figures) shows how impressive all of this this is. (Those of you who know your Blade Runner quotes will know that just after saying this, Tyrell was killed by Roy Baty I’m not suggesting that anyone should take this literally.) Eldon Tyrell - burned so very, very brightly. Since you started in 2004 with those first few nodes, ways and relationships, you have - to paraphrase a certain Dr. So with that out of the way and stated upfront, I want to opine on OpenStreetMap…ĭear OpenStreetMap, you are truly amazing. What follows is my opinion and views, not those of my current employer, not those of previous employers, and certainly not those of future employers. In the past I’ve worked on Yahoo’s maps, on Ovi/Nokia/HERE maps, and these days I’m freelancing, which means the Ordnance Survey - the United Kingdom’s national mapping agency - is my current employer. This is very much an opinion piece of writing, and as such I want to start with a disclaimer. A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he tweets about maps, writes about them, and even occasionally makes them. He is co-founder and director of Malstow Geospatial, a consultancy firm offering bespoke consulting and services in the geospatial, geotechnology, maps and location based services fields. A self-professed map addict, Gary Gale has worked in the mapping and location space for over 20 years through a combination of luck and occasional good judgement.
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